Solidarity or Silence

At London's cinemas last week, a grim, low-budget little picture called The Angry Silence played to packed audiences and drew queues at the box office. Its story: the ordeal of a factory hand ostracized by his mates for refusing to join a wildcat strike. As punishment, his fellow union members "sent him to Coventry"* and thus condemned him to life in a silent, hostile world.

The Angry Silence has not yet reached the gritty Midlands industrial town of Birmingham, but when it does, its message will have a special meaning for 146 workers in the Birlec engineering factory, makers of industrial furnaces. Tom Dobson, 38, an expert welder earning $42 a week, is in Coventry. Since March 13, no one has spoken to Dobson because he insists on his right to join the Amalgamated Engineering Union instead of either the boilermakers union or the sheet metal workers union, which monopolize the plant. Dobson once belonged to the boilermakers at another plant, was called out on three wildcat strikes, and now he says, "I don't want to get mixed up with an irresponsible union again."

In reprisal, the unions declared him "untouchable"; any machinery he handled was "unclean." Men mutter curses as he passes, get up from the lunch table when he sits down. The management has shifted him to an isolated area, where he works on small, 30-lb. furnace doors that he can handle alone. And there he stays eight hours a day in bitter silence, finding relief only when he goes home at night to his wife and five children. Says he grimly: "I can stick it out as long as they can."

In British labor today, Coventry has become a common form of social punishment. Labor leaders estimate that in the last several years at least 50 workers have been sent to Coventry for one breach of union solidarity or another. The treatment can be tragically effective. In 1956 a railroad engine driver named Jack Heginbotham put his head in a gas oven after living in silence one solid year. Says another victim: "I have seen grown men standing still and doffing their caps as I passed by to show me that as far as they were concerned I was dead."

The punishment, say union men, is tough but necessary. "It may seem like bullying," argues a Trades Union Congress official, "but it is also a fact that society has some sort of right to impose pressure on a bloke who won't toe the line. You get a form of anarchy if people strike off on their own."

A good many more Englishmen think it is about time for everyone to grow up. Said London's News Chronicle: "There are limits beyond which union solidarity becomes brutality."

*Apparently traceable to the 17th century, when the citizens of Coventry supposedly enforced a ban of silence against the soldiers of King Charles I during the Civil Wars.

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